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'It Took 10 Seconds For Instagram To Push Me Into an Anti-Vaxx Rabbit Hole' (vice.com)
eatmorekix quotes Vice: It only took around ten seconds. On Wednesday, I created a fresh Instagram account, and followed 'Beware the Needle', a user with 34,000 followers which posts a steady stream of anti-vaccination content. I also followed the user's "backup" account mentioned in its bio, the creator clearly aware that Instagram may soon ban them. Instagram's "Suggested for You" feature then recommended I follow other accounts, including "Vaccines are Genocide" and "Vaccine Truth." I followed the latter, and checked which accounts Instagram now thought would be a good fit for me: another 24 accounts that were either explicitly against vaccinations in their profile description, or that posted anti-vaccine content.
They included pseudo-scientists claiming that vaccines cause autism; accounts with tens of thousands of followers promising the "truth" around vaccinations through memes and images of misleading statistics, as well as individual mothers spouting the perceived, but false, dangers of vaccinating children against measles, polio, and other diseases.
"Instagram told Motherboard it will be looking at different ways to minimize these sorts of recommendations," the article reports, but "did not give a more specific timeframe for this change...."
"For the moment, however, Instagram remains a hot bed of easy to discover misinformation on vaccinations."
They included pseudo-scientists claiming that vaccines cause autism; accounts with tens of thousands of followers promising the "truth" around vaccinations through memes and images of misleading statistics, as well as individual mothers spouting the perceived, but false, dangers of vaccinating children against measles, polio, and other diseases.
"Instagram told Motherboard it will be looking at different ways to minimize these sorts of recommendations," the article reports, but "did not give a more specific timeframe for this change...."
"For the moment, however, Instagram remains a hot bed of easy to discover misinformation on vaccinations."
It's endemic.
I'm sorry, it sounds like you deliberately went to this site for the sole purpose of finding this information yourself, so you could report on it for your publication.
Am I missing something?
Instagram's recommendations were consistent with the interests expressed. I fail to see what the problem is here.
This may not be "fake news", but it is garbage.
It's showing adults what they ask to be shown. You told Instagram to show you Antivaxx content and it did show you antivaxx content. If it had told you "welcome to Instagram, check out these antivaxxers", then there would have been a problem.
Part of the problem is that these services have too much blind faith in their ability to make predictions based upon incomplete knowledge. They REALLY need to come up with a way for users who end up pigeonholed and seeing endless recommendations for content to indicate, "Alright, enough already! I read a goddamn article about something while I was bored & taking a dump. Go back to recommending the kind of stuff I'm NORMALLY interested in."
It's like the way TiVo used to be. A few years ago, my brother's family came down for a weekend. I recorded two episodes of a show for my niece & nephew. For the next 3 months, my Tivo was absolutely HELLBENT on endlessly recommending shows on Disney & Nickelodeon, despite the fact that I had about 40 open-ended scheduled recordings for shows that were about as close to being polar opposites of Disney & Nickelodeon kids' shows as you can get. It's like their algorithm said, "Oh, JOY!!!! Someone who now has small kids!!!! Now they're ensnared in the parent-industrial complex forever!!!"